The higher education system of the future

Via Denis Dutton, Camille Paglia offers a criticism of todays college education and appeal to a more job centered approach focused on trades:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

I have to say I am drawn into argument by her criticism of the humanities and their ills, e.g. “pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics”, and any suggestion that begins with gutting this from the higher education system will catch my ear. However, I don’t know how much of a solution she has offered.

She wants us to “revalorize the trades”, and make sure that “every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools”. I agree these are good things, but ultimately the problem lies with the incentives and constraints these institutions face, not with mission statements or relationships.

Until we know exactly why it is that universities aren’t already operating with an “obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges” we won’t know how to make them be better. Surely parents and students desires and freedom of choice should incentivize them to be effective already. I don’t think imploring them to be different nor a school’s acceptance of a new mission to do so will suffice. I believe the problem is deeper than administrators and professors knowing how to be a good university.

4 comments

So essentially too many students aspire to be like Paglia but they don’t have the chops. Her own students too no doubt.

Yes, so how best to enact change that implicitly claims that too many students falsely aspire to be wordsmiths and intellectuals. Hm, I wonder if conservatives themselves can be accused of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

A small problem with vocational training. Is this what universities are for? And can vocational schools cater for future employment needs? (Can anyone remember hordes of computer programmers being schooled in the 1960s?)

Nothing will really change until one’s education – however achieved – comes to be seen as an integral part of one’s identity that can be directly accessed and action taken from. In other words, schools of all kinds still teach us that we can not be validated until the organization that hires us, validates us. When people can be validated by their own community, education of all kinds will finally gain true worth, whatever the education is.

It’s tough to take this too seriously—first off, what jobs? Lots of people with lots of types of education, are looking for jobs—restructuring colleges and universities so that they “revalorize the trades” will only put out more people who are looking for jobs-doesn’t matter to me if the jobless are carpenters or sociologists or medievalists: it’s not education (and it’s not post-modernism either) that is deskilling, deprofessionalizing faculty, disempowering unions, etc.
Furthermore, Paglia thinks, no surprise, that SHE was the sort to benefit from some sort of fairly esoteric education—she took on, in her toot-her-own-horn phrase—a “broad perspective and profound erudition” during the 1960’s. Well, Why doesn’t she advocate and work for everybody else to have such an opportunity? I think she’s just bored with some of her students.